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I ran across a Chicago Trib story noting that the city council voted yesterday to make the Windy City America’s first community to ban sales of polycarbonate-plastic baby bottles and “sippy” cups. A lofty claim, but every town and hamlet in Minnesota is actually slated to beat Chicago by 30 days.

Indeed, five days before Chicago did, Minnesota declared it was outlawing baby beverage-...

From Washington, D.C., at the Fourth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health

A constituent of green tea can revive moribund brain cells, Israeli researchers report. The team experimented with animal neurons that had been chemically poisoned to model the death of dopamine-producing cells in Parkinson's disease.

Certain plants are picky about the company they keep. Once established, walnuts and some sandy shrubs, for instance, create a virtually barren border of ground around them. Many other plants aren't quite so antisocial. They permit numerous species into their neighborhoods, while barring a few plant types.

In November, an unusual swarm of tiny critters caught the attention of a crewmember on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration boat docked in a Lake Michigan channel. He asked Steven Pothoven of NOAA's Great Lakes environmental field station at Muskegon, Mich., what the critters were.

"I could see they weren't fish, so I netted some," the biologist recalls. Under...

Immense numbers of sharks each year are slaughtered for their fins—not meat, just their fins. This harvest helps feed a growing appetite throughout Asia for a popular soup, one with snob appeal comparable to that of caviar. Indeed, a single bowl of shark-fin soup can cost $100 in a high-end Hong Kong restaurant.

At dozens of beaches around the world, huge female sea turtles come back each year at about the same time. They slowly haul themselves out of the water near the places they themselves hatched, dig shallow holes in the sand, and lay clutches of eggs. The predictability of the turtles' return has made capture of the endangered reptiles and their eggs a reliable bonanza for poachers.

On a warm, sunny afternoon last June, emergency room physician Sean Bush got a call on his pager that made his blood run cold. The number was his wife's, followed by three digits: 9-1-1. Whatever the page concerned, Bush knew that it was a serious emergency—he and his wife don't take those numbers lightly.

With striking red, black, and white stripes decorating its body, fins, and some dozen spines along its head, back, and sides, the red lionfish is at once beautiful and frightening. The football-shaped fish can grow up to 18 inches long and is poisonous to the touch. At smaller sizes, this subtropical fish from Asia is extremely popular for hobbyists with saltwater aquariums, but the red...